History
Before the FWS, there was no central authority to establish wage equity for Federal trade, craft, and laboring employees. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the former Civil Service Commission to work with Federal agencies and labor organizations to study the different agency systems and combine them into a single wage system that would be sensible and just. President Johnson called for common job-grading standards and wage policies and practices that would ensure interagency equity in wage rates. He established two basic principles for these policies and practices: Wages will be set according to local prevailing rates, and; there will be equal pay for equal work and pay distinctions in keeping with work distinctions.
Congress established the FWS by law in 1972. It created a joint labor-management Federal Prevailing Rate Advisory Committee (FPRAC) with an independent Chairman. Agencies and labor unions are members of the Committee. FPRAC studies all matters pertaining to prevailing rate determinations and advises the Director of the OPM on appropriate pay policies for FWS employees.
Read more about this topic: Federal Wage System
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The principle office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–117)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)